bloatedness went away. My eyes were no longer puffy and the black and blue marks from falling down started to fade. But I had really done myself some damage. I was only twenty-three years old and I looked forty.
That same month Glen Buxton was rushed to the hospital in critical condition. He’d simply OD’d on too much alcohol with no rest and no food. They cut him open, drained some of the loose booze out of him, and tried to put him back together again. His pancreas was ruined. They warned him that if he ever touched another drop it would kill him. His stomach, his liver — none of him was functioning right. Glen was either on the wagon or in the ground.
We were entering the twentieth month of our stardom flat on our backs, the full meaning of what we had accomplished, who we had become, first beginning to dawn on all of us.
I managed to stay on the wagon — beer only — a solid month in Jamaica, and I can tell you that none of us ever mentioned alcohol once. In a month I was tan and felt much healthier, but I still had surprise attacks of nausea and diarrhea, and the shaking hardly stopped at all.
I was waiting to board the plane at the Jamaican airport, tan, dressed in a white, double-breasted suit, holding a stuffed armadillo that I bought as a souvenir, when I got a terrible attack of nausea. Cindy begged me to try and control myself until we got onto the plane so I wouldn’t have to find the men’s room in a crowded airport. There’s nothing more frustrating than looking for a bathroom while you’re signing autographs. But I couldn’t take the feeling any longer and I rushed headlong down a corridor, into a bathroom marked “Closed.” It was brand new inside. The sinks still weren’t attached to the pipes in the walls, and I dashed into a stall and threw up. When I regained my composure I picked up my armadillo and flushed. The toilet exploded all over me. The water spluttered into the bowl in great rushes, splattering my white suit all over the front.
By the time we got on the plane Cindy was nearly crying out of embarrassment. People were shoving each other up the aisles trying to get away from me and the armadillo. The stewardess said to the other passeners, “How disgusting! Well, that’s Alice Cooper for you.”
CHAPTER 15
Within two years Alice Cooper had become an international phenomenon. My fame had transcended my craft. I was the biggest act in the world, and I felt I owed it to the public to come up with the biggest of all possible shows. I really wanted to do something that was more than just sheer entertainment. I wanted to do a show that was an observation, too, that made a comment about the world I had seen in my travels.
Every city I saw was the same, striving for total decadence. Every teenager in the world wanted more possessions, more stereos, sports cars, telephones and TVs. I knew seventeen-year-old kids in Greenwich and Bel Air with their own Rolls-Royces and drivers. The public was fascinated with my wealth and how I spent it. Overindulgence and affluence were the cornerstones of my life-style. It was why people loved me, and why people ripped me off, too.
No matter what the question, money was the answer: “Do you want to bring that snake into this auditorium?” — $166 in German marks. “Do you have the special papers to bring the guitars through customs?” — $500 cash. “Mr. Cooper’s suitcases? We’ll find them within the hour. What do you mean he’ll miss his plane?” — $50 and a bottle of VO. Everybody had questions for us. “Billion-Dollar Babies” was supposed to be the final answer.
The object of the “Billion-Dollar Babies” tour was to pull a show business coup based on the concept of greed. We wanted to blitz the public with a single tour and album of such overwhelming proportions we could retire afterwards. The basic plan was to release a Billion-Dollar Babies album followed by a swift, hard tour across the country, playing as many dates in the largest halls in as short a time as possible. We would have a chance of propelling the album to number-one position and gross nearly $6 million on the tour. In the end, “Billion-Dollar Babies” stood to gross $20 million. In the end, we tried to play sixty-two concerts in fifty-nine cities within ninety days. In the end, it wrecked us all.
We tried to record part of Billion-Dollar Babies album at the Morgan Studios in London. We invited Harry Nilsson and Marc Bolan by to join a session, but by the time the evening was over all we had was four hours of unusable tape and a L 300 bar bill. We finished recording on a mobile unit at the Cooper mansion in Connecticut and at the-Record Plant in LA and New York. The album cover was quite an extravaganza. It was shaped like an overstuffed wallet, snakeskin, naturally. Inside there was a billion-dollar bill, wallet-sized photos of the group, and a strikingly handsome sleeve jacket printed with a picture taken of us by David Bailey in his London studios. We made special arrangements with the FBI and the Treasury Department to have a million dollars in U.S. cash flown to London for the photograph. We posed in white satin suits, surrounded by dozens of white rabbits and green money, holding a little baby in Alice Cooper makeup. The album included “Elected,” which was already a best-seller, “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” my ode to the press, and several songs that became Alice Cooper classics, including an infamous version of Rolfe Kemp’s “Hello Hooray.”
The stage was designed and executed by award-winning set designers Joe Gannon and Jim Newborn at a cost of $250,000. It looked like a giant TV quiz show, with luminous platforms and multileveled areas for me to dance across. Every moment of the show was carefully rehearsed and planned. People were beginning to respect the fact that Alice Cooper was reviving vaudeville, and that “Billion-Dollar Babies” was not just another rock and roll slop show. I began the show with “Hello Hooray,” slithering down the steps like a drunken Dietrich, enticing the audience from the edge of the platform to come join me in the fun. From there we pounded into “Raped and Freezin’,” “Elected,” and “Billion-Dollar Babies.” The lights dimmed for “Unfinished Sweet.” I was strapped onto an operating table and attacked with a giant drill, after which I got chased by a huge dancing tooth which I finally clobbered with a four-foot toothbrush and a five-foot tube of toothpaste. Then into “No More Mr. Nice Guy” and “Sick Things.” During “Sick Things” I raped and chopped apart baby dolls and mannequins, soaring into an anthem, “I Love the Dead,” which the kids sang along with.
For “Billion-Dollar Babies” I gave up the noose and had a guillotine designed by The Amazing Randi, a magician who went on the road with us and played the parts of dentist and executioner. The guillotine had a real forty-pound blade in it. After “I Love the Dead,” Randi led me to the guillotine. As always the audience got quiet, waiting breathlessly for the sound of the falling blade. From my hiding place behind the set I could always tell when the dummy’s head got lopped off and fell into the barrel from the cheering in the audience. The rest of the band retrieved the bloody head from the basket and kicked it around the stage as a football.
In the end of the show I return dressed in white, the good Alice back again. During the finale we had a recording of Kate Smith singing “God Bless America.” I walked around the stage waving an American flag and spitting Budweiser at the audience with an actor named Richard M. Dixon who looked just like the ex-President. When the lights came up in the auditorium we beat the hell out of him. (We knew what we were doing way back then.)
The logistics of moving the set, sound, and people through the country were staggering. The tentative crew included the five members of the band, Shep, Dave Libert as tour director, Mike Rozwell as advance man, Shep’s assistant Gail Rodgers, The Amazing Randi, Richard Dixon, a four-member road crew, three members for stage production, a master electrician, a master carpenter, Charlie Carnal for lights, three technicians from Showco Sound, two truck drivers, and six guys in an opening act.
Then there were incidentals: 400 comic books, 3,000 pounds of crunchy Granola, 5,000 pre-prepared meals, 140 cases of Seagram’s VO, 250,000 cans of Budweiser, 300 deeks of cards, and 1,000 Alice Cooper poker chips. (And Flo and Eddie, who are two of my best friends and kept me going through all of this.)
We took this assortment with us on our own plane, a huge F-27 Electra dubbed the AC-I. We had a snake in the shape of a dollar sign painted on the tail. Most of the seats were torn out and replaced with pillows. We had a blackjack table installed, at which I won $4,700. The walls were papered with nudes and Alice Cooper paraphernalia, and the plane was equipped with everything Alice Cooper, right down to napkins that said “Fly Me, I’m Alice.” The two stewardesses had both been dismissed from commercial airlines on morality charges.
On the ground, in two tractor-trailers, along with the set, traveled forty tons of equipment, including the sound system, the dentist’s giant drill, a surgical table, six whips, six hatchets, 22,000 sparklers, 23,000 program books, 10,000 patches, 3,000 baby dolls, 58 mannequin torsos, 14 bubble machines, 28 gallons of bubble maker, 280 spare light bulbs, 6,000 mirror parts, 250,000 packets of bubble bath, five pounds of gold glitter, a carton of
